Portfolio Marketing

To support the gathering of buyer, customer, and market insights, portfolio marketers must work with their marketing operations colleagues to determine the ideal technology. In her latest blog post for Forrester, Katie Fabiszak highlights her upcoming B2B Summit North America session with Barbara Winters.

When considering portfolio marketing’s role in enablement, take a revenue enablement approach to ensure that knowledge is delivered to the various teams that require it in the way they want to receive it, and delivered when they need it.

Why do so many new products fail? Our fast-thinking brains reject the novel in favor of the familiar. Good positioning capitalizes on fast thinking and making your offering feel familiar to buyers.

Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Study, with more than 950 respondents from around the world, reveals significant changes in buying behavior.

Even with the best intentions and C-level support, it is difficult to transform a B2B organization from having a product-centric to an audience-centric go-to-market strategy.

Forrester benchmark data shows that retained business accounts for the lion's share of company revenue. How well are you protecting that share?

As organizations prepare for 2021 and beyond, they need to focus on what matters most, which includes examining market trends and understanding buyer needs. Here are the five key actions portfolio marketers must take.

Portfolio marketing teams can play a key role in annual planning efforts by analyzing new markets and new buyers for growth opportunities.

Portfolio marketers today are being asked to lead. They must help their organizations find the new opportunities, identify the trends that can give their organizations lasting success, and ensure that buyers are kept top of mind.

Learn how organizations can become more strategic, aligned and agile when bringing offerings to market with the new version of the PMM Model.

“Who should be responsible for competitive analysis?” “Who should own go-to-market strategy?” “Who creates user personas?” These questions aren’t surprising, given that one of the most common topics we help our clients with through our Product Management and Portfolio Marketing research services is establishing or improving the product commercialization and lifecycle process. Companies are trying to be faster and more nimble, more customer-centric, and more consistent in how they innovate and bring offerings to market to drive growth.

• Buyers have a lot of needs that messaging may need to address
• Compiling a unique messaging set for each buyer can be overwhelming and time-consuming
• Build messages at different levels to give your organization a matrix to choose from for each buyer

• Nuance Communications’ response to how it could aid customers during COVID-19 was simple — “Kindness before commerce”
• Delivering specific value based on what your customers requested is possible
• Demonstrating your company’s values in real time will make a lasting impression

• Q2 earnings provide a valuable data point on how your customers are weathering the downturn
• Earnings reports are a great way to get insight into your customers’ organizational needs
• Avoid getting overwhelmed by selectively sampling your audience to validate hypotheses or characterize trends for specific segments

• The dynamics between vendors and buyers is shifting rapidly, and even more so with the COVID-19 pandemic
• Understanding the expansion of buyer expectations will be instrumental for portfolio marketers to meet their needs and successfully progress them along the buyer’s journey
• Join us at Summit EMEA in October to learn what actions to take to address these rapidly changing buyer expectations

• With limited resources, healthcare CMOs are under pressure to gain consensus with sales and product functions on where marketing should invest
• To prioritize investment areas, organizations must consider their internal capabilities to succeed as well as external market opportunities
• By using the SiriusDecisions Relative Targeting Framework, Change Healthcare achieved cross-functional consensus on strategic business priorities for marketing investment

• At Forrester SiriusDecisions Summit 2020, two organizations that exemplify best-in-class portfolio marketing were recognized
  
• This blog post follows one winner, Kodak Alaris, as it implemented a new worldwide product launch process
  
• Through implementing best practices, Kodak Alaris saw global adoption and tangible results as it brought a new solution to market

• This year’s Forrester SiriusDecisions Summit recognized two organizations that exemplify best-in-class portfolio marketing
• One of those winners, Atlassian, evolved successfully to an audience-centric go-to-market approach
• Through implementing best practices, Atlassian saw tangible results as it tested buyer-focused messaging

• Devoting effort to revamping the go-to-market playbook and transforming the buyer’s journey might initially seem like a strange choice in a time of tightened budgets
• At this year’s Summit, Phil Harrell explained why now is actually the perfect time to create a new and improved buyer’s journey
• Keep an eye on the LTV/CAC ratio to increase efficiency and create a buyer’s journey that accommodates the preferences of today’s buyers